The main job of the day was a double fix in Fareham. We went via central Oxford as Moon had a meeting about a big gargoyle project at New College. We parked up on Mansfield Road. The parking was £5.70 per hour. Moon looked at the ticket machine, raised his eyebrows, puffed out his cheeks and said he’d try to get the meeting wrapped up in fifty-five minutes. He disappeared into one of the buildings and I walked into town. I’d heard lots of good things about J.L Carr’s A Month in the Country so my mini mission that morning was to go and buy a copy before Moon had finished his meeting. The book is set in 1920, in the fictional northern village of Oxgodby. It’s about a young man, still suffering from the aftereffects of serving in the First World War, who’s been given the job of restoring a huge medieval wall-painting in the village church. I had to buy it - it sounded right up my street.
It was about 9:40 when I got to Blackwell’s, but unfortunately they didn’t open until 10am so I went further down Broad Street and called into Waterstone’s who were open. I found the book on a Classics table near the counter. The assistant I handed the book to was wearing Scrabble tile earrings. THEY dangled from their right ear and THEM dangled from their left.
‘I love your earrings,’ I said.
‘Thank you. I made them myself.’
‘Right ear ten, left
ear nine.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Your scrabble
scores. Your right ear’s winning.’
I walked back past Blackwell’s. It was 9:57. A German man and his young son were standing outside.
‘Drei minuten,’ the
man said.
I walked back down
Holywell Street, past Wadham College’s Holywell Music Room where Moon had
designed and carved the shield within the giant cockleshell above its doorway. I wondered how many people have walked past
and looked at it, drawn in by the single gilded half-chevron that shines on the
shield, sitting sheltered from the rain within a broken pediment. I wondered how many more people will do so in
the future.
There were lots of impossibly bright young students walking to their respective colleges. One such student spotted another and shouted ‘Amelie!’ to get a young woman’s attention in front of him. My mind had already overheated by mental arithmetic in Waterstone’s, but I found myself suddenly having to do more. The French film Amelie was released in 2001. The Amelie in front of me was eighteen or nineteen. She would have been born a few years after the film was released. I wondered whether she was named after everyone’s favourite whimsical Parisian waitress. I hoped she was. Perhaps her parents fell for each other through a mutual love of world cinema. Perhaps Amelie was the first film they saw together.
When my Mum was pregnant with me, she got her palm read by a woman in the back of a gypsy wagon. She had rings on every finger and told Mum that if she has a son, she should call him Rocky.
I turned left into Mansfield Road and sat back in the van. I started reading the first few pages of A Month in the Country while I waited for Moon to finish his meeting.
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